Underwater
In the month of September, I’ll be heading to Miami to begin production on ‘Underwater’, a documentary about the effect of the housing crisis on the city of Miami; in particular, I’ll be following a group called ‘Take Back the Land’, who run a free service squatting vacant foreclosed units and moving homeless families into them. This project is a kind of synthesis of interests and obsessions I’ve cultivated over the years.
Since I was young, I’ve had this kind of trepidation towards the idea of housing as investment. The notion that a person must own a house to achieve fulfillment, prosperity, etc. is one that is internalized by members of the modern Anglophone culture. In the United States (and elsewhere of course), that mentality recently culminated in the housing bubble, which we can now recognize as one of history’s most spectacular cases of malinvestment; along with Tulip Mania, The South Sea Bubble, and of course the first Florida Land Boom. When I first heard about the advent of squatting in America, I was compelled to take a trip and meet the people behind it.
This is a co-production with Roman Rain Films, and is being executive produced by Sean T O Sallaigh; who also executive-produced Dark Fibre, (a film that I was editing earlier this year.)